List and get rid of obsolete program core dump files and completely disable core files on FreeBSD

Tuesday, 1st November 2011

My FreeBSD router has started running out of space, I looked for ways to clean up some space. So I remembered some programs are generating core files while they crash. Some of these files are really huge and ban be from 1Mb to > 1G.

I used find to first list all my produced core files starting from root directory (/) , like so:

find / -name core -exec du -hsc {} ;
....

Having a list of my core files with the respective core file size and after reviewing, I deleted one by one the cores which were there just taking up space.
It’s a wise idea that core dumps file generation on program crash is completely disabled, however I forgot to disable cores, so I had plenty of the cores – (crash files which are handy for debug purposes and fixing the bug that caused the crash).

Further on I used an /etc/rc.confdumpdev=NO , variable which instructs the kernel to not generate core files on program crash:

freebsd# echo 'dumpdev=NO' >> /etc/rc.conf

Next, to make dumpdev=NO , take affect I rebooted the server:

freebsd# shutdown -r now
...

There is a way to instruct every server running daemon to know about the newly set dumpdev=NO by restarting each of the services with their init scripts individually, but I was too lazy to do that.

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